States of Mind: Tracing the Edges of Consciousness review – walking in a waking dream

4 /
5 stars

Wellcome Collection, LondonFrom gothic nightmares and early neural imaging to the operating theatre, an inspired exhibition explores the mysterious territory at the borders of wakefulness

An Unconscious Naked Man Lying on a Table Being Attacked By Little Demons Armed With Surgical Instruments; Symbolising the Effects of Chloroform on the Human Body, by Richard Tennant Cooper, 1912.
Photograph: Wellcome Library, London

What does thought look like? In the early days of photography a French army officer called Louis Darget believed “nervous fluid” passed out of the brain and the fingertips and that the new medium could capture the ghost of that fluid in pictures. To this end, Darget spent most of a long secondary career pressing unexposed plates to the foreheads of sitters and having them “project” thoughts. The results were predictably abstract and blurred, but the Society for the Study of Supernormal Pictures (patron: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) spent many long evenings peering at them as you might gaze at clouds, or Rothkos, and trying to tell a projected hawk from a projected handsaw.

At the frontiers of sleep and wakefulness, like at the margins of those old flat-earth maps, there be dragons

In this inspired Wellcome Collection exhibition, Darget’s photographs are presented immediately alongside nearly contemporary drawings made by the pioneers of neural imaging – the vagaries of superstition give way to the precision of science. The images themselves are no less fantastical, however. The work of the Italian physician Camillo Golgi (who developed a method for staining brain tissue that revealed the filigree of neurons for the first time) and the Spanish scientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal (who developed Golgi’s methods to depict images of “astrocyte” glial cells, which some contemporary neurologists believe are the enablers of human imagination) seems to exist on the border between matter and wonder. Lovingly inked, each structure seems wonderfully appropriate to its function (or maybe that’s just me projecting). While Golgi’s neurons, the root and branch of thought, have the appearance of wintry forests, Cajal’s drawings of the feathery brain cells of a two-month-old baby have visual echoes of both pond life and constellations. They seem perfectly suited for the twin possibilities of the human condition: “in the gutter, looking at the stars”.

You might argue that all creativity exists on this outer edge of consciousness, giving shape to the ephemeral; most of the images here are at least intent on mapping its coordinates. In this effort, metaphor often seems just as useful as fMRI scans.

In order to establish the dualities of mind and matter, René Descartes introduced the fiction of the “pineal gland” in the centre of the maze-like structure of brain, a gateway for the soul, and labelled it accordingly in the illustrations to his De Homine of 1662. A religious image of the soul from the Jain tradition is a much more playful imagining; full of primary-coloured building blocks, a Jenga of the mind.

Jean Holabird’s 2006 Vladimir Nabokov: Alphabet in Color also stacks up blocks of pigment, this time like a nursery-school learning system. The ABC comes alive through Nabokov’s precise word pictures of his synaesthesia, the involuntary mingling of one sense perception with another – seeing sounds, tasting words, associating colour with abstract language – now thought so crucial to many artists’ practice. Here, the novelist’s words caption Holabird’s letters: “the alder-leaf green of ‘F’”, “the ivory-backed hand mirror of ‘O’”, “the drab shoelace of a capital H”, and you begin to see language through his shape-shifting eyes. A University of Sussex experiment, an interactive element of which you can play with, suggests that anyone can learn to become synaesthetic with about nine weeks of training. There’s an idea for the national curriculum: a generation of potential Nabokovs within a term.

The neural pathways within this exhibition lead you on a journey that becomes somewhat more tangled and darker. At the frontiers of sleep and wakefulness, like at the margins of those old flat-earth maps, there be dragons (and demons and witches and phantoms). Various artists have tried to fix them. Sleep paralysis, hypnagogia, the terrifying experience of waking without full bodily consciousness, becomes the diagnosis for hallucination, and the explanation for angels and alien abduction. In such unnerving states, the world of sleep bleeds into the world beyond our senses. It’s tempting to believe that William Blake was a lifelong hypnagogic. Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare, that infamous painting of a lustful looking imp squatting on the chest of a sleeping beauty (represented here in an 1815 engraving by Thomas Holloway), appears to depict many of the disturbing sensations of suffocation and malignity that sleep paralysis can induce.

Nightmare and the gothic make inevitable bedfellows. Hearing some of the contemporary accounts of hypnogogia collected by the artist Carla Mackinnon, and soundtracked in the gallery on a whispering loop, is like listening to the opening chapter of Wuthering Heights. Sleepwalking, in which the body wakes without the conscious mind, is the obverse of hypnagogia. Footage from a sleep lab reveals disturbing CCTV of the nocturnal thrashings of a man who suffered from REM behaviour disorder, which caused him to physically act out his dreams every night. Like a character from the Brothers Grimm, his solution for eight years had been to tie himself to his bedposts before sleep, to avoid attacking his wife.

The ability to create such states in other people at will has long transfixed us. Hypnotists were often associated with the occult; an unknown artist of 1815 satirises the “animal magnetism” of Franz Mesmer, in a cartoon in which a therapist with the head of a goat gazes lasciviously on his sleeping, sheep-like female patient. A copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is open at an appropriate page on the side table.

A clip from Aya Ben Ron’s film Still Under Treatment, which records the moment that seven patients become unconscious under general anaesthesia at Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem.

The science of anaesthetics, still partly a mystery, has taken some of the fear out of that submissive relationship – though not in the strange imagination of Richard Tennant Cooper, who paints a naked patient chloroformed for an operation while a demonic incubus surgical team take a corkscrew to his nethers. It is hard to say whether Cooper’s lurid fantasy is more or less strange than the adjacent closeup film of real-life patients at the moment of losing consciousness before surgery. Watching them, it seems odd that we don’t pay much more attention to the half-dead states of mind that this exhibition brings vividly to life. I don’t remember ever seeing such operating room images before, or indeed being alarmed about undergoing general anaesthesia the few times I have experienced it. I suppose it’s because every time we go to sleep, our consciousness convinces us that it will again wake up.